Inside Retail’s Top 50 People in E-Commerce is an annual ranking of the most impressive and inspiring leaders in Australia’s online retail industry. Our 2024 report features C-level executives with decades of leadership experience, alongside start-up founders and digital specialists with a wide range of skills, from marketing to logistics. You can download it here.Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing in-depth profiles of this year’s Top 10, starting with the person who ranked #1 – Matthew Horn, GM, customer and digital, Country Road Group. Here’s the story of how Matthew first started working in the e-commerce industry, and the characteristics that set him apart from his peers. It all started at a house party at the end of 2011. That’s where Matthew Horn, five years into his law career and ready for a change, fell into conversation with someone who was working at a start-up “looking for smart people willing to work hard”. That was enough to pique Matthew’s interest, so the following Monday, he went in for an interview and got the job. Two months later, the start-up named itself The Iconic, and three months later, it started trading. Today, The Iconic is known for having pioneered same-day and weekend delivery in Australia and for harnessing the power of data to improve the online customer experience, but back then, e-commerce was still relatively uncharted territory in Australia.“I was there for four-and-a-half years. They were the hyper-growth years, so it was a bit of a pressure cooker to be perfectly honest,” Matthew told Inside Retail. He bounced around different roles at the company before ultimately leading and building The Iconic’s online marketplace offering, which he noted was the first part of the business to become profitable. In 2016, he left to join another start-up: Uber. While this marked a “sharp left turn” from the online fashion sector, Matthew said he felt the team at Uber had the same energy as The Iconic did in its early days.“Everything that made The Iconic so successful was amplified at Uber,” he said. “The talent was exceptional, the money was flowing in – there was literally no idea that was too crazy. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Still, five years later, he felt the familiar itch to take on a new challenge. This time, Country Road Group came knocking, and once again, Matthew contemplated a leap into the unknown. Having spent the last 10 years in the world of start-ups, could he achieve the same results in an established business with legacy systems and many layers of oversight?   “To build something great and achieve hyper-growth in a start-up context – where there are no processes or systems or technology – has its own challenges because you’re starting from scratch,” he said. “It’s completely different to do that in an established, quite large business. And that’s what drew me to CRG.”Mobile revolutionSince joining Country Road Group in 2020, it’s safe to say that Matthew has proved it’s possible to apply the lessons learned from start-up culture to drive innovation and change in a traditional retail business. To give just one example, in 2023, Country Road Group launched three mobile apps in less than 12 months, rolling out platforms for the Country Road, Mimco and Witchery brands. This is part of the company’s strategy to shift more customers to mobile. Not necessarily to increase transactions, although some of the apps are already contributing 32 per cent of online revenue, but rather to enable entirely new CX possibilities. “We’re more energised about what this means for how we can enhance in-store experiences,” Matthew said. “How can we use this thing in the palm of everyone’s hands to do really creative things?”To answer that question, he won’t be looking to other businesses in the retail industry for inspiration because, as he said, “The standards of good CX are very often being set by people in non-adjacent sectors. “We’re constantly getting challenged in our delivery experience because people have been conditioned to get their pizzas in 15 minutes with Uber, so why can’t I get my jacket in 15 minutes from Country Road? That’s a pretty profound challenge for us.”The secret sauceBeyond the success on mobile, Matthew is most proud of the team and culture of innovation he has built at Country Road Group. “I feel vindicated that you can do it,” he said. “It’s hard. There are very different mindsets in established businesses versus start-ups. There are lots of legacy processes, and there are different attitudes to governance, which is sometimes a good thing and a bad thing. But the flip side is, because of our scale, when things work, they really work.” Over the course of his career, Matthew has thought a lot about the “secret sauce” that makes organisations great, and he believes it comes down to two things: talent and culture. Successful businesses are ruthless about hiring the best talent – they never compromise just to alleviate capacity constraints – and they’re principles-led. Matthew himself is an avid follower of Amazon’s Leadership Principles, which include statements such as “learn and be curious”, “hire and develop the best”, and “bias for action”, which is another way of saying ‘fail fast’.“One thing that always stays with me is a quote from Jeff Bezos,” Matthew said, “Take care of the inputs and the outputs take care of themselves.”